There’s one important task, the Finder in Mac OS X isn’t able to do properly – naming and renaming multiple files.

Try to name 50 Grammy samples and let them all start with ‘S Grammys 2013 – ‘, that means, you’ve got to rename 50 files by hand, each on its own. Or another example: Renaming dozens of files to have every word capitalized, also a pretty annoying job, believe me.

Until I found this little gem in the App Store – Name Mangler

Check out what this little piece of software can do and why this was one of the best investment in an app

Name Mangler works via drag & drop, so just pull the files you want to rename in the Name Mangler window, where you can start renaming your files and more. Name Mangler features options like finding and replacing single words, letters or symbols (a nice technique to replace all the _ in a file with a space character), adding prefix or suffix or extensions, changing case and more.

Here’s an example for removing characters:

In the upper left you can choose the various options of renaming files. Here, I’ve chosen ‘Remove/Insert Characters’.

Just type in how many characters you want to be removed and from which character you want to start removing. You will see a preview of the renamed files in the right.

You can also insert new characters in the same process.

Another example for changing cases of Files:

Drag the files in the Name Mangler window and set it to ‘Change Case’. In the right window you can choose your options like ‘Capitalize’ or ‘Change to lower case’ and more.

After you’re done with renaming, just click ‘Rename’ and all the files will appear with the new file names in your Finder.

For me, Name Mangler made my daily work much, much easier, although it would be great to do several tasks at once. You have to get the files after the first renaming back into the Name Mangler window to do the next task.

Apart from that, I’m really thankful for this helper and I don’t want to miss it anymore.

Yeah, the issue with the undo feature is not that great, but it seems that they feature an undo function since version 2.4 and version 3 also has it. All users of older versions have to rely on double checking before renaming. Sorry about that.